Green Room

20 years ago today: The first World Trade Center bombing

On February 26, 1993, Islamists detonated a bomb in the World Trade Center’s underground parking garage, killing six and wounding hundreds — a lethal prelude to 2001′s outrage at the very same location. National Review’s Andy McCarthy, who prosecuted the notorious “Blind Sheik” for his role in the attack, writes that Americans are no longer merely blind to the threats we still face; we’re willfully blind:

Despite serial atrocities, thousands of deaths, and a decade of war, we are today more willfully blind to the reason we were attacked than we were back in 1993 — back when our ignorance might have been excused by our homeland’s seeming invulnerability to the scourge of jihadist terror. Regardless of our reluctance to see it, mainstream Islam — the dynamic Islam of the Middle East, unadulterated by incentives to moderate, at least for a time, while settling in non-Muslim lands — is aggressively hegemonic. As proclaimed by another iconic supremacist, Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated.” And to dominate for a very specific reason. Supremacists are not the irrational savages we have been so desperate for two decades to portray them as. Whether the jihad terrorizes by explosives, suffocates by the systematic subjugation of women and persecution of religious minorities in Islamic countries, or infiltrates by stealthily using liberty to undermine liberty in the West, the mission is always coherent and always the same: the imposition of sharia.

…

We did not want to acknowledge the sharia logic of the terrorists 20 years ago. We were told then that Islam had nothing to do with attacks on the West incited by Muslim jurists citing Muslim scripture. There is no selling that fairy tale today, not after thousands of Americans have lost their lives. So the lie has become more aggressive, like Islam itself. While poseurs such as John Brennan — President Obama’s counterterrorism czar and nominee for CIA director — distort the meaning of jihad, Islamists and their fellow travelers seek not merely to suppress by intimidation but to criminalize by law the objective examination of Islamic supremacism. We’ve gone from willful blindness to coerced silence…It is as true today as it was on February 26, 1993: Freedom cannot defend itself. It requires vigilant defense by culturally confident people who see their heritage of liberty as worthy of passionate defense. The Sheikh Abdel Rahmans of the world do not lack for cultural confidence. They see themselves as winning — they’ve seen it that way every day for the last 20 years.

Andy’s piece is uncomfortable reading, but it’s the truth. May his admonitions not go unheeded, and may the victims of the 2/26/93 terrorist attack on New York City never be forgotten. RIP.

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Comments

As a kid I was acquainted with one of the firefighters who would eventually respond to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. I “grew up” with his older kids as he was a neighbor of my dad’s. He even spoke before Congress about the potentiality of another such terrorist attack and related concerns. Several months later, the World Trade Centers were attacked again, and John Jack Fanning was there again, responding.

I was ridiculed when I proclaimed 9/11 was a clash of civilizations. Bernard Lewis saw the light. You cannot willfully subjugate half of your civilization and expect this to be merely a matter of semantics. The West has been at war with Islam since 642 A.D. Nothing has changed.

The West has been at war with Islam since 642 A.D. Nothing has changed.

John the Libertarian on February 27, 2013 at 3:45 AM

I say that the discovery of the New World in 1492 caused the West to take its eye off the ball and concentrate on something else for 500 years. The good news is that it allowed us to build a modern, industrial society capable of completely vanquishing Islam once and for all. The bad news is that society post-WWII has become soft without the belly for a fight.

After all, I certainly cannot defend how my Democrat Hero Bill Clinton treated this first WTC attack at a law enforcement issue and not a national security one, and then by his later lack of curiousity about anything other than cigars left his successor 9/11/2001.

As a kid I was acquainted with one of the firefighters who would eventually respond to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. I “grew up” with his older kids as he was a neighbor of my dad’s. He even spoke before Congress about the potentiality of another such terrorist attack and related concerns. Several months later, the World Trade Centers were attacked again, and John Jack Fanning was there again, responding.

Jack walked away from the Trade Towers in 1993; he did not in 2001.

RIP Jack.

Logus on February 26, 2013 at 11:14 PM

I never had the privilege of meeting Mr. Fanning or any of the other brave men who responded to those attacks on our nation, but I do remember the events happening when I was in junior high school in Manhattan at the time.